The Luminos Fund

The Luminos Fund is a private philanthropic donor fund which aims to bring the life-changing opportunity of education to the most disadvantaged children across Africa and around the world.

How it began

In just ten months, using an accelerated learning initiative called Speed School, children are equipped with the reading, writing, and math skills they need to enter mainstream school in fourth grade.

With the Legatum Foundation’s funding, and our management of the program, over 80,000 children have gone back to school in West Africa and Ethiopia.

With this initial program proven, Legatum was interested in developing and scaling more education interventions to ensure that millions of children have opportunities for a quality education.

By creating a pooled funding vehicle, the fund could attract more donors to collaborate in giving children around the world a second chance at education.

Our work

As the fund and program manager, we took on a variety of activities to establish and launch the fund. This included:

Co-creating the fund’s strategy. We worked with the Legatum Foundation to develop the mission, vision, values, and priorities of the fund.

Developing the fund’s operational and administrative processes. From providing legal advice to how and where the fund should operate, to setting up the fund’s administrative and financial procedures, we took care of all the details needed to get the fund up and running smoothly.

Validating the model. We commissioned a pedagogical review of the model to evaluate the teaching methodology, identify critical success factors, and uncover gaps to be addressed.

Creating investment cases. We conducted research on various countries and the educational context to determine how and in which locations the fund can implement effective interventions.

Marketing the fund. We assisted in the development of marketing content for the fund’s print and online materials.

Packaging the program processes and tools. To create a replicable, scalable, and efficient model as the fund expands its work into more countries, we developed a comprehensive toolkit made up of all the procedures, training manuals, tools, and curriculum needed to run a Speed School program.

As the fund begins to scale its work to more countries, we will continue to provide program management and other operational services to ensure that millions of children have access to the skills and knowledge they need to live a more prosperous life.